fabric friday

These moody earthy tones are so hard to photograph. They do have a bit of sparkle to them. 

Available here. SOLD

Have a good weekend!

How long.....

...does it take to get used to a new sewing machine?

I purchased my Janome 1600P Professional back in October, so it is not that new, but I still feel that I am getting used to it.

It is a big beast of a machine but it is powerful and it is FAST!

It has no fancy stitches, not even a zig zag. It is a work horse and I intend to work it!

I have to confess that I got a bit carried away with the speed of it while making this piece and I ending up snapping a needle that got jammed in the works. That mucked up the timing and I had to get it sorted at our local repair shop. Totally my fault and I have learnt my lesson.

So it was back to my old faithful, which for those who are interested is a Janome 4800 Memory Craft. It is at least 15 years old and has never given me any trouble which is why I was happy to go with a Janome machine again.

Thanks for reading (and thanks to Debs Nixon for her machine recommendation)

fabric friday

Trying out some special packs of one off mixed fabric packs.

Have a good weekend!

Festival Of Quilts Workshops

 I am teaching some Quick and Easy Workshops at Festival of Quilts in August.

STENCIL AND STITCH MOON GAZING HARE
Thursday 11th August 11.45 am
Friday 12th August 11.45 am
Sunday 14th August 10.30 am

HAND STITCHED (SLOW) LANDSCAPE
Saturday 13th August 10.30 am

STAMP AND STITCH MINI ART QUILT
Saturday 13th August 1.00 pm

So if you are going to be at the show this year and you need to take the wait off your feet for  it would be great to see you!

Details of all the workshops can be found here

fabric friday

Summer is coming, right? Beach Fabric Packs now available here.

Thanks for looking!

Embroidered Hare Quilt

It began last year as a project to stitch in the evenings. A slow project.
It began as a rough sketch by me, which was turned into something more special by my illustrator daughter.

I shared progress shots over on Instagram.

I had drawn the design onto a piece of hand painted sky fabric and used Lana wool to do the stitching.

The surrounding area was stitched in embroidery floss. ...which took a while to complete.

Once done I wasn't entirely sure what to do next so it languished for a while but finally last week I decided to mount it onto another quilt background.

Seeing it from the side gives a better view I think.

And here is it's full frontal!

Thanks for reading!

Journal Quilts 2016

It might seem as if I had decided not to take part in this year's Journal Quilt Challenge run by the Contemporary Group of the Q.G.B.I. It is May after all !!!

There was a point last week when I did consider throwing in the hat when I discovered that despite my best efforts back in Jan to get ahead of the game by working in sets of four, I had in fact neglected to stitch my offering for April and it had to be hastily finished before the deadline on April 30th.

I was wondering why I was giving myself this extra task to do when I really do have more than enough other projects to keep me occupied. I also considered that I could continue without the need to be in a group that imposes a deadline.

Well as you can see I did completed this section and I remembered that I do actually very much enjoy the PLAY aspect of doing these mini quilts. I also have enough self knowledge to know that if I didn't do them as part of the group challenge, they wouldn't get done!

So here are the first group of four put into a not very clear collage made in an an App on my phone.

The challenge/guidelines for 2016 is to make an 8 x 10 in  piece in portrait format, each to contain a a small block of colour. The first four months to contain purple. It has been really interesting to see what others have come up with but it is a closed group so I cannot show you sorry.

I have decided to look at traditional blocks with added machine and hand stitching.  As you can see I haven't finished them off yet as I might try and join them together as three small or one large quilt when I have completed all twelve.

I have already made a start on May with another added twist but I have to confess that I am not sure about my plan at the moment. :/